The Runaway Bride Meets The Cockshitfuckeringtons

I read a script today.

The formatting was fine. It ran a tad long. There were some clever jokes. They could maintain "voice" for the most part. It had a beginning, middle and end. A welcome, merciful, very looked-forward to ending.

It was a romantic comedy.

Historically, I am not the biggest fan of romantic comedies. I will try to think of the few that I've really liked...SAY ANYTHING, AMALIE, SLIDING DOORS (thus, I'm a homosexual), AS GOOD AS IT GETS, GROUNDHOG DAY, and SO I MARRIED AN AXE MURDERER. If you count these two as RC's, then PRINCESS BRIDE and GROSS POINT BLANKE are my very favorites.
Just last week I saw an amazing romantic comedy done right; YOU AND ME AND EVERYONE WE KNOW. That's about it. I'm sure I'm forgetting some stragglers but there are hundreds and hundreds of romantic comedies. If you count all the one's from the 40's there might be thousands. As a whole genre that's pretty terrible.

To the point;

I realized while I was reading this script why romantic comedies are in general, so terrible. They're all just like The Aristocrats.
That is, the beginning and the end of a romantic comedy are all the same in order to qualify as a romantic comedy. ACT I is any manner of Unrequited Love or Two Lovesick Lost Souls. The end of ACT III? They get together.
The Two Lovesick Lost Souls can be particularly agonizing because everything could be solved by a fucking phone call.
Hello? Wow! You're my soulmate, and I love you forever! El Fin.

However you have to fill that sticky bit called ACT II.

And the middle my friends is where the devil makes his bed.

Any crazy-assed story - that you would never accept in any other genre - can be crammed into that middle part and nobody seems to bat an eye.

Mistaken identity is a big one. I think that's because they can just copy out of Cyrano de Bergerac. Come to think of it, they do. Every time.

Time travel, dead lovers, shape-changing lovers, and alien lovers are all fair game. (Big bonus points if somebody tells me what 4 movies I'm referring to right there).
Engaging in behavior that would normally get you arrested is the bare minimum in stupid crap.

On a closer examination, RC's are sort of a negative image of The Aristocrats when examining the two by merit. The middle of the Aristocrats is all that matters because it's the execution and delivery of that section that makes the joke, not the ending.
In RC's, the middle would be Cool Whip or Blueberry pie filling if the producers thought they could get away with it because all they're really interested in is that last moment. The moment when the two characters admit to, discover, or confess their love for one another. That's the RC's "money shot".

Based on what I've read tonight, (up there with MAID IN MANHATTAN or GIGLI) there is a silent contest amongst RC screenwriters to come up with the most ridiculously retarded bullshit in the history of the universe for that middle part.
I don't know if they win millions of dollars, or get some secret WGA prize for writing the dumbest shit ever concieved by man, but the goal is clearly there.